Former Celtic defender and current Partick Thistle manager Mark Wilson has laid bare the gulf between Celtic’s European highs last season and the sobering reality of Tuesday night’s exit in Kazakhstan.
Barely six months ago, Celtic pushed Bayern Munich all the way in the Champions League and were seconds away from forcing extra time in Germany. Fast forward to now, and Brendan Rodgers’ side have crashed out to Kairat Almaty without scoring a single goal over 210 minutes.
At that moment, you felt like Celtic were one or two signings away from being a consistent Champions League team.
Mark Wilson said on Sky Sports, “It’s tough to explain. Of course, there’ll be a lot of questions tomorrow, and there’ll be a lot of fallout. The narrative, obviously, with the lack of investment into this Celtic squad—when you look through it—and the right-back’s a young right-back, it finishes the game a young centre-back, a centre-back at left-back…
“There is obviously questions that need to be answered, and there will be accusations that probably the Celtic board gambled on the players that they got to get them through to the Champions League stage—and it’s backfired dramatically here.
“They’ve been poor, over 210 minutes of football, created very, very little. Of course, Maeda had a chance right at the tail end of the 90 minutes that he didn’t take, but did they deserve to go through? Probably not.
“You think back to playing Bayern Munich and almost going through to the last 16—they were great on that occasion. This is the polar opposite. A lot of questions to be answered in the morning for Brendan Rodgers and Celtic.”
It’s a long journey home for Celtic, who are running delayed as they make the long-haul flight back to Glasgow. They’ll land a few hours late on Wednesday morning, but they’ll need to recover quickly.
The first Glasgow Derby of the season is up next for the Hoops with a trip to Ibrox pending on Sunday.
Albeit Rangers haven’t had the best start to the season, Celtic are a long way off where they want to be. It will be no easy game for the Bhoys, but they will be backed by about 2,000 fans in the away corner of the stadium.
